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A Type-Theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation

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A Type-Theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation A Type-theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation Satoshi Tojo Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc. 2-22 Harumi 3, Chuo-ku Tokyo 104, Japan e-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract hardly find a verb element in the target language, which corresponds with the original word exactly in Tense and aspect, together with mood and modality, meaning. However we also need to admit that the usually form the entangled structure of a complex verb. problem of knowledge representation of tense and as- They are often hard to translate by machines, because pect (namely time), or that of mood and modality is of both syntactic and semantic differences between lan- not only the problem of verb translation, but that of guages. This problem seriously affects upon the gen- the whole natural language understanding. In this pa- eration process because those verb components in in- per, in order to realize a type calculus in syntax, we terlingua are hardly rearranged correctly in the target depart from a rather mundane subset of tense, aspects, language. We propose here a method in which each and modMities, which will be argued in section 2. verb element is defined as a mathematical function ac- cording to its type of type theory. This formalism gives 1.2 The difference in the structure each element its legal position in the complex verb in the target language and certifies so-called partial trans- In the Japanese translation of (1): lation. In addition, the generation algorithm is totally oyoi-de-i-ta-rashii free from the stepwise calculation, and is available on parallel architecture. the syntactic main verb does not change from oyoi- (swim), which is the original meaning carrier; and the past tense is replaced by -ta- which is indistinguishable 1 The problem of complex between past and perfect in Japanese. The feature of verb translation English verb complex derivation is the alternation of the syntactic main verb, described in fig. 1. On the 1.1 The difference between languages (~ (b~ (swim))) +-- 'seem' In this section, we will briefly mention the difficulties past progressive of complex verb translation. The term complex verb refers to those verb structures that are formed with (seem (to ~ (~ (swim)))) modal 'verbs and other auxiliary verbs in order to ex- past progrcssive press rnodMity or aspects, and which are attached to Figure 1: new verb arrival in English the original base verb. For example, in a complex verb: contrary in Japanese, new verb elements are aggluti- seems to have been swimming (1) nated at the tail of verbs, as is shown in fig. 2. (,~U,))) 'swim' is in both the progressive aspect and the past (~ ( ~-dei- ~-- 'rashii(seem)' tense, upon which 'seem' is attached with the inflec- swim progressive past tion of agreement for the third person singular. Such a structure is so often hard to translate to other lan- guages both because surface structures become dif- swim pro9 resslve past ferent between languages, and because some aspec- Figure 2: new verb arrival in Japanese tual/modal concepts cannot be found in the target lan- guage in the generation process. 1 We admit that the most recalcitrant problem in verb 1.3 The existence of external modal- phrase translation is that the differences of tense, as- pect, mood, and modality systems. Hence, we can ities XThe systems of tense, aspect, and modality are different In the history of machine translation, the analysis of a from language to language, and their typology ha.s been dis- complex verb structure seems to have been rather ne- cussed in linguistics [1], [21, [9]. glected. Even in an advanced machine translation sys- 1 353 tem of CMU-CMT [8], a verb complex is represented Externality To clarify the externality of modal conventionally like: functions mentioned in the previous section, we put the following definition: (vp (root . ..) (negation +/-) Definition of externality: We call those (modality .... ) modal functions which can have their own (tense .... ) tense and negation external; otherwise we call (aspect ...) ) them internal. However this flat description fails in the following cases. Interlingua Here we propose the simplified sets of First, certain modalities can have their own nega- modalities, aspects, and tenses, which are recognizable tion. The sentence both in English and in Japanese, mostly based upon the work of [7]. You must play. ( [:l[you play]) can be negated in two ways: tense = {past, present, future} aspect = {progressive, perfect, iterative, in- You must not play. choative, terminative} ([:3--[you play] = [:3[you don't play]) external modality You don't have to play. = {possible, necessaw}®{epistemic, deontic} (-~D[you play S or {hearsay, seem} internal modality = {able} The former is the negation of 'must' while the latter is the negation of the sentence, where in parentheses The two dimensional analysis of eplstemic and deontic above [] is necessity and -~ is negation operator. is considered, reflecting the duality in meaning of 'may' A similar thing can be said for tense. A certain kind and 'must'. of complex verbs such as 'seem to be' can have two positions to be tensed as below: Verb elements as function We assume that the crude result of a parsing process for a complex verb is seemed to have been the list of verb elements such as: It has been discussed that there are so called ex- ternal modal expressions, that are embedded from the past1, seem, past2,progressive, swim,... (2) outside of the sentence ([3], [4], [10], [11], and [14]). The key issue is that those external ones concern only Our objective is: the speaker's attitude of the sentences in illocutionary situations in order to express deonticity, uncertainty, * to construct the interlingua expression from these and so on, and are indifferent to the sentence subjects. verb elements such as: Although there should be a controversial discussion as (q-ed(seem)) ((-t-ed(progres sive)) (swim)) to whether a certain modal verb is connected to speak- ers or not 2, we will engage this matter in the following • and to derive a surface structure of the target lan- formalization of complex verb translation. guage from the interlingua expression. In order to do this, we will regard each verb element 2 Formalization of complex as a function. The main concern here is the domain of verb translation each function. For example, an external "past" oper- ator +ed should operate upon external verbs, not in- We will give a formal definition of modality as a func- cluding internal verbs. We will realize this idea, being tion here, and discuss the strategy of verb complex independent of each intra-grammar in complex verbs generation in which each modal element is used as a of various languages, in the following section. function itself. In this section we use the term 'modal We express a verb complex as a composition of a functions' both for modal operators and aspectuM op- root-word, tense, negation, and verb-complement, erators as long as there is no confusion. in which root and verb-form are included; veomp may be included recursively. 2Although the concept of modality is based on the deontic distinction/epistemic between possibility and necessity such as Fig. 3 is an example of a ,k-function of tt perfect: 'can', 'may', 'must', tbe term is sometimes used in a broader sense inclusively 'will'(volitive) or 'can'(ability). We distin- `kxVe~b-,t~c~u~e.perfeet(x) guished the externality by its independent tense and polar- ity (positive/negative), so that broad-sense modal verbs such as volitive and ability are regarded as actually internal while which takes a verb structure as a parameter, and pro- narrow-sense ones are often external. duce a more complicated structure. 354 (vp (roet; be) 3.2 A simple example (tense negation) Let us consider an example of concatenating seem with (vcomp (root swim) +ed(swim). First, assume that we can infer the type of (vform ing) )) +ed(swim) to be ~1 from F by a variable instantiation (~p O'oot h~ve) 0, as is shown below in (3): (tense negation) r0 ~ +ed(s~im): V'~ (3) (vcomp (root be) (vrorm pp) As for seem : ext, because 'ext' was a mnemonic for (vcemp (root swim) a certain modifier of a verb phrase, we can put ext = (vform ing)))) (~1 -~ 5~). Hence, for a new type variable 9a2, set r/1 as (4): Figm'e 3: perfect-ization in English ~q, = mgu(extO, W -4 p~) (4) 3 Type inference for complex verb composition Note that we have not specified the contents of 7h We will make use of polymorphic type theory [6] in the yet; we will give them later. We can now infer the fnrther formalization. The reason we adopt the type type of combined verb phrase with (4), as is shown in formalism is to realize "the internality of concatenation fig. 4 where we can use a canonical expression (see [5]) rules"; namely each verb element shonld know which Ax.seem(x) instead of seem. elements to operate upon, instead of being given a set of grammar on concatenation. Behind this purpose lie tile following two issues: ]-"/1 ~ seem: extT}l r0/]l [- +ed(swim): qCl~h (_+ E) • parallel computation: to realize a fas~ parallel computation on coming parallel architecture F'igure 4: inference of seem(+ed(swim)) , partial translation: for machine translation to \Ve use '~' to denote that the type of the left-hand be robu:-'t for ill-founded information in the lexicon side is more instantiated than that of the right-hand side, so that: 3.1 ~pes for verb phrase First we will set up several mnemonic types.
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